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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Baseball gives military vocal performers some visibility; an odd experience to go to a game on the day of the MLB suspensions

Okay, a Major League Baseball game is hardly a Broadway
Play, unless you think it’s fixed. No,
but I did make time to get out to see the struggling Washington Nationals play
the division leading Atlanta Braves Monday night, in order to see Stephen
Strasburg pitch.

There was a little bit of military show: a detachment from the United States Coast
Guard embellished the “first pitch”, and a female officer named Christ sang the
National Anthem a cappella, and then sang Ronald Reagan’s favorite “God Bless
America” during the seventh inning stretch. What followed was some disco music that you would be more likely to hear upstairs at the Town DC.

Some people, when they join the military, do get to perform
music publicly – beyond the reach of the bands in each branch of service (who
often perform on the Capitol Fourth).
The service academies have choirs, and Naval Academy midshipman Joseph
Steffan sang the National Anthem at an Army-Navy game in Philadelphia in the
1980’s, before being denied the ability to graduate in 1987 for “admitting” he
was gay late in his senior year (book “Honor Bound”, books blog, Oct. 10, 2007.

I’ve always thought that “The Star Spangled Banner” could use
some “recomposition” (by you know who), and maybe some polytonality, or at
least more chromatics. The first stanza
is repeated literally. And the chord
under the word “Free” in the last line (“land of the Free”) should be
harmonized on on a chord other than the tonic B-flat major.

I hate to admit it, but the Soviet Union had one of the most
interesting national anthems, a played during the 1982 movie “Reds”.

The Nationals lost, 3-2, but missed several chances and did
not execute particularly well last night.

There was another element on people’s minds, though; it was
yesterday (that is, the day I chose to go to a game) that MLB announced its
suspensions of a number of players for using performance enhancing drugs. Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez was one of two
players cleared. But during the evening,
people could see news on their smartphones that the Yankee’s Alex Rodriquez had
appealed the almost career-ending suspension and was back in the Yankee lineup in
Chicago Practically everyone thought
that the Yankees’s allowing him to return during the appeal was inappropriate.

The doping, as we note, is all part of what David Callahan
calls “The Cheating Culture” in his 2004 book (as in Books blog, March 28,
2006). It makes one wonder how valid is the “eusociality” of rooting for home
town sports teams.

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